The _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ was made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this "poor cankered creature."[520] The _Lectures on the English Poets_ is characterized as a "third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer."[521] The _Political Essays_ was said to mark the writer as a death's head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge of _The Examiner_, the ward of Billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of England.[522] Later, in a discussion of _Table Talk_,[523] he becomes a "Slang-Whanger" ("a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble").
Hazlitt's _Letter to Gifford_, 1819, was a reply to all previous attacks of the _Quarterly_. For a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is "lively reading," for Hazlitt, like Burke, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[524] He calls Gifford a cat's paw, the Government critic, the paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners, a nuisance, a
"dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man.... Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets and spleen of his wrath on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness; not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding."[525]
_Blackwood's_ had accepted abstracts of Hazlitt's _Lectures on the English Poets_[526] from P. G. Patmore without comment and even managed a lengthy comparison of Jeffrey and Hazlitt with an approach to fair dealing. But by August, 1818, he had been identified with the "Cockney crew" and he became "that wild, black-bill Hazlitt," a "lounge in third-rate bookshops"; and as a critic of Shakspere, a gander gabbling at that "divine swan." In April of the following year he was christened the "Aristotle" of the Cockneys. His _Table Talk_ provoked ten pages of vituperation,[527] and _Liber Amoris_, two reviews as coarse as the provocation.[528] In the first of these, apropos of his contributions to the _Edinburgh Review_ and in particular of his article on the _Periodical Press of Britain_, the downfall of the magazine and its editor is announced as certain. Hazlitt is called a literary flunky, a sore, an ulcer, a poor devil. In the second he is Hunt's orderly, the "Mars of the Hampstead heavy dragoons."